I have an old S9 right here on my desk. I cracked the screen, and took it to one of those screen replacement places, and he asked if I had insurance. I told him I didn’t, and he said, wellllllll it’s going to be a lot more expensive than you think to replace this screen.

That wraparound screen they had was basically also the frame of the phone - you’re not so much replacing the screen as you are moving the rest of the components to a new phone body. I wasn’t sold on value of that wraparound screen in the first place; this didn’t improve my opinion of it.

We put a plastic screen protector on it and a new case, and I used it for a few months until we were ready to upgrade phones.

Forfty percent of people know that!

Statistician.

But the Simpsons lied to me. I have not been offered the opportunity to go to space.

Oh, yeah, I enjoy the traveling. My thought was just that as I was watching the pump total price go higher and higher. But I still travel for vacations. :)

Nah. One of my coworkers stays home for every vacation and reads. We try to guess how many books she’ll read during her week off each time. Closest guess, without going over, wins. She loves it and crowns a winner each time she returns, but the winner only gets bragging rights until her next vacation.

A few years ago I was at a gas station pumping fuel on a trip, while prices were extremely high, and I was thinking to myself that her way is certainly much less expensive.

I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.

It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.

I always remember that when I’m working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we’re not thinking of…

I recall being told that CDs were bad to keep in cars because of the heat.

I always kept my CD wallet (a small one with 10 discs that I’d switch out every now and then) under the seat and never had a problem. Before I had that, I had a CD case that kept maybe 20 discs in their jewel cases that I kept behind the driver’s seat, and no issues there either (though that was MUCH harder to swap discs while on the road). I also had a visor holder that I later used in the motorhome with MP3 CDs (now I could take my whole collection!).

In the early 90s, I paid $300 for a very basic in dash Sony CD player with output for only two speakers. Somewhat early adopter tax.

Don’t forget ringback tones.

You just unlocked a memory for me, and this happened from about 2008-2010 (not cell related, but it is phone related).

One day we got home and there was a message on the machine from someone asking us to remember to bring something when we visited him. Unfortunately, we had no idea who it was, so we just wrote it off as a wrong number. It happened a few more times after that, and we were getting curious.

I’d moved into the house in 2006 and received that phone number at that time. We often got calls from bill collectors looking for the previous residents, so we generally let everything go to the machine.

One evening we got a call, and I think I recognized that the number was this person’s, so I answered it. I told him he had the wrong number, and he said he’d had that same number for years and read back my number, the one he’d just called. I was like, “Uh, I don’t know what to tell you, but I’ve had this number since 2006.” He tried a few more times, and it was sometimes late in the evening.

At some point I looked up the number he was calling from and found it was a nursing home, and the pieces started to fall into place. My wife and I talked about it a few times, and we decided that if our relative was doing that, we’d want to know. We weren’t upset, but it felt like information the family should have. Who knows who else he might be calling, or getting calls from. So, we decided that when he called again, we’d call the nursing home and let them know it was happening.

But, we never got the chance. He never called again.

And the critics of Columbus WERE RIGHT! He was vastly underestimating the size of the earth. If North America hadn’t existed and it had just been one big ocean, he and the expedition would have perished in the middle of nowhere. Of course, the size had been calculated before his expedition (the actual values turned out be extremely close to what had been calculated), so he should have known better. There’s a reason he had trouble getting funding for his expedition…

I’m still somewhat frustrated that our history classes taught (maybe still do, I’ve been out of high school a long time) that all the naysayers thought the earth was flat.

For those, like me, who don’t remember the significance of the lights on the Wii remote (the console has been out of production for a decade or something now), the third light blinking means he’s player 3.

Even Oreos?

“Your dog made a mess.” “We have such a good dog!”

Fair enough. lol

Why did you buy a reddit account?

Years ago, when one of those emails with the malicious links was going around (I forget which one), one of our coworkers clicked on it. This one promised pictures of cute kittens. She later said she knew it was fake, but she was hoping she’d still get to see the picture of the kittens…

Is this a serious question? Because I thought Shelly was a reputable company?

Yes.

Our Mazda has “manual” control of the automatic where you can tell it to shift by clicking a button or moving the gear selector. But like yours it won’t do anything stupid. I’ve played with a few times, but I just can’t get into it.

For towing (or hauling heavy loads in general) - you definitely need to be able to lock out higher gears sometimes in the mountains. If your transmission is hunting between gears, then lock it to a lower one. Our pickup has a tow/haul mode that handles this automatically; the motorhome I had before just had an “overdrive” button that locked out the overdrive gear for the same reason.